Thursday, June 22, 2017

In all my comments on this I talked around the obvious. I've said it elsewhere dozens of times but it's so front and center here it just slipped by.

Schutz and Neel are called artists. Jordan Peele is a comedian. Neel's success is still the success of the observer, the success of the philosophical, collaborative model associated with fine art and academia, but of an older aristocratic tradition (Hilton Als is no leftist). Neel succeeds in observing the other through sympathy and friendship, not ideas. Smith should have written about her. Peele's comedic adversarialism says "fuck you" to the laziness of white bourgeois assumption, not to Neel and to elite, leisurely, openness and curiosity. True bohemians model themselves aristocrats. That solves none of the problems of aristocratic art, of which Neel remains a practitioner. But Neel is from an older tradition and she's dead.

Get Out is the answer to Hannah Black's self-rightous bourgeois moralizing. Get Out is the necessary criticism of Open Casket.

We have been warned not to get under one another’s skin, to keep our distance. But Jordan Peele’s horror-fantasy—in which we are inside one another’s skin and intimately involved in one another’s suffering—is neither a horror nor a fantasy. It is a fact of our experience. The real fantasy is that we can get out of one another’s way, make a clean cut between black and white, a final cathartic separation between us and them. For the many of us in loving, mixed families, this is the true impossibility. There are people online who seem astounded that Get Out was written and directed by a man with a white wife and a white mother, a man who may soon have—depending on how the unpredictable phenotype lottery goes—a white-appearing child. But this is the history of race in America. Families can become black, then white, then black again within a few generations. And even when Americans are not genetically mixed, they live in a mixed society at the national level if no other. There is no getting out of our intertwined history.

The Root: Get Out Proves That ‘Nice Racism’ and White Liberalism Are Never to Be TrustedNational Review: Fear of a White VillageBreitbart: Jordan Peele’s Horror Movie ‘Get Out’ Casts ‘Liberal Elite’ as the MonsterNYMag: Jordan Peele’s Genius New Horror Movie Shows the Terror of Being Black in World Full of White People

Breitbart and NYM use the same quote quote from Peele.

“It was very important to me for this not to be about a black guy going to the South and going to this red state where the presumption for a lot of people is everybody’s racist there,” Peele told the audience after the film’s midnight screening. “This was meant to take a stab at the liberal elite that tends to believe that ‘We’re above these things.'”

Can a film be too inflammatory for its own good, or are there times, and places, when only fire will suffice? In an interview with the Times, Peele, whose mother is white, admitted that the movie was originally intended “to combat the lie that America had become post-racial,” and the result is like an all-out attack on a rainbow. Short of making us listen to “Ebony and Ivory” over the closing credits, “Get Out” could hardly be more provocative. There’s a scene with a head-stamping, a scene with an exposed brain, and a truly creepy scene with a bowl of Froot Loops. And yet, despite all that, what makes this horror film horrific is the response that it gives to the well-meaning and problem-solving question “Can’t we just learn to live together?” To which the movie answers, loud and clear, “No.”

Last Thursday evening, the Whitney Museum held a private reception for members to celebrate the opening of its 78th biennial. As the party ensued, images of the biennial’s artworks surfaced on social media sites, and the 24-year-old, emerging black artist Parker Bright came across a painting by the white artist Dana Schutz....

As the 2017 Whitney Biennial opened to the public the day after the reception, Parker walked into the museum’s fifth-floor galleries wearing a shirt that read, “Black Death Spectacle,” and stood in front of Schutz’s painting, blocking it from view for several hours.

“It is very important to keep in mind…that there is a divide between what the public perceives and what the curation intends to be perceived by the public,” wrote Bright in a letter after his protest.

The words on the t-shirt:"black death spectacle"

It's not an interesting painting, and it's also a cheap gesture.

"[T]here is a divide between what the public perceives and what the curation intends..." The curators followed Schutz, taking her intention as their own.

Schutz’s critics accuse her, first, of aestheticising atrocity in an offensive and insensitive way. ‘Where the photographs stood for a plain and universal photographic truth,’ Josephine Livingstone and Lovia Gyarkye argue in the New Republic, ‘Schutz has blurred the reality of Till’s death, infusing it with subjectivity.’ But ‘aestheticise’ is precisely what painters can’t help but do when they paint from photographs; think of Gerhard Richter’s paintings of the Baader-Meinhof terrorists who died in police custody, or of Picasso’s Guernica. It may be impossible for a painting of an atrocity not to ‘aestheticise’ horror. The charge could be levelled at a painting of another racist atrocity at the Whitney Biennial, Henry Taylor’s depiction of the death of Philando Castile, who was killed in his car by a Minnesota police officer last July. But Taylor, unlike Schutz, is black.

Henry Taylor, THE TIMES THAY AINT A CHANGING, FAST ENOUGH!

...Seldom has the charge of cultural appropriation stung so sharply in liberal circles. White fascination with black culture turns to gruesome intellectual property theft in Jordan Peele’s brilliant new horror film, Get Out, whose villains kidnap black people to steal their brains. ‘I want your eyes, man,’ one of the perpetrators, a seeming liberal, says to a young black man. ‘I want those things you see through.’

Schutz makes no claim to see Till through black eyes. In her response to the protest letter, she said plainly that she has no way of understanding ‘what it is like to be black in America’, which can be read either as a disarming expression of humility, or (less charitably) as a failure of imagination. But she has otherwise deferred to the terms of the debate set by the protesters, who argue that experience, if not identity itself, confers the right of representation. As a mother, Schutz says, she can imagine the pain of Mamie Till Mobley, who lost her 14-year-old son, and is therefore qualified to use this image to create a ‘space for empathy’. The effect of her comment was to assert a right to represent rooted in personal experience, and to further particularise suffering. But black history – as W.E.B. Du Bois and James Baldwin, among others, always stressed – is American history; confronting it a common burden.

...What is most troubling about the call to remove Schutz’s painting is not the censoriousness, but the implicit disavowal that acts of radical sympathy, and imaginative identification, are possible across racial lines.

The original, shocking, political gesture was Mamie Till's decision, and only hers to make. That's the role of intimacy in politics, the role liberal universalists don't understand. Taylor's painting is much more direct. It fits the model of "political art", telegraphing a point where the sympathies are obvious. It doesn't play games across contested territory, at least not contested among liberal followers of the arts. Shatz refers to Richter's October 18, 1977, but Richter is a German facing Germans. And Picasso was a Spaniard doing the same. The parallel to Schutz could be seen as Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader, and the film that was made from it.

Gerhard Richter, Confrontation 2, and 3, both 1988

Again, this has nothing to do with appropriation or art as such. The issue is the art of assumption, of well-meaning appropriation. Artists who steal and don't give a shit are more respectful of their sources than those who pander. Artists who steal, steal what they love, for their own reasons and without apology. In considering failure, we're back to the Salon Painters.

Picasso's disfigurements of women were honest depictions of his own fears, the misogyny described as much as indulged. The description makes them interesting. Schutz' painting, stripped of context -again a context she simply indulges- is more a formal exercise than a depiction of a human being. Shatz refers to Schutz' painting as an act of "radical sympathy", but that's a judgment, not a fact. And it's a judgement that's not only his to make. "Some of my best friends are Jews!" Do not those who are being offered sympathy have the right to judge? Liberals are horrified to think that Get Out refers to them.

Shatz also discusses John Ahearn, but the issues aren't the same. Ahearn's mistake was to transform private art, for and about friendship, into public monuments. That's a much more complex issue.

For now the obvious answer to Schutz, and to Shatz, obvious because her work is on view at the same time, is Alice Neel at Zwirner, curated by Hilton Als.

Alice Neel, Ballet Dancer, 1950, Oil on canvas 20 1/8 x 42 1/8 inches

From the start Alice Neel's artistry made life different for me, or not so much different as more enlightened. I grew up in Brooklyn, East New York, and Crown Heights during the 1970s when Neel, after years of obscurity, was finally getting her due. I recall first seeing her work in a book, and what shocked me more than her outrageous and accurate sense of color and form—did we really look like that? We did!—was the realization that her subject was my humanity. There was a quality I shared with her subjects, all of whom were seen through the lens of Neel's interest, and compassion. What did it matter that I grew up in a world that was different than that which Linda Nochlin, and Andy Warhol, and Jackie Curtis, inhabited? We were all as strong and fragile and present as life allowed. And Neel saw.

In the years since her death, viewers young and old have experienced the kind of thrill I feel, still, whenever I look at Neel’s work, which, like all great art, reveals itself all at once while remaining mysterious. In recent years, I have been particularly intrigued by Neel’s portraits of artists, writers, everyday people, thinkers, and upstarts of color. When she moved to East Harlem during the 1930s Depression, Neel was one of the few whites living uptown. She was attracted to a world of difference and painted that. Still, her work was not marred by ideological concerns; what fascinated her was the breadth of humanity that she encountered in her studio, on canvas.

But by painting Latinos, blacks, and Asians, Neel was breaking away from the canon of Western art. She was not, in short, limiting her view to people who looked like herself. Rather, she was opening portraiture up to include those persons who were not generally seen in its history. Alice Neel, Uptown, the first comprehensive look at Neel’s portraits of people of color, is an attempt to honor not only what Neel saw, but the generosity behind her seeing.

Tuesday, June 20, 2017

Why Didn't Obama Voters Vote For Hillary Clinton?
To me this is the fundamental question of the 2016 election.

For some reason this is a sensitive question. I'm not sure why. Maybe Robby Mook sucked. Maybe misogyny as a voting influence is deeper than racism as a voting influence. Maybe voters weren't happy with the results of 8 years of Obama. Maybe 25 years of media attacks on Clinton did their job. Maybe Clinton was a horrible campaigner. Maybe her proposed policies sucked. Maybe the media didn't talk about policy (they never do, so of course). Maybe CNN becoming "The Donald Trump" show for 10 months or so did it. Maybe Clinton's ad campaigns sucked. I actually don't have any answer, and of course one can invoke any and all of these things to throw the necessary couple of hundred thousand voters in the right places to Clinton.

Whatever the reasons, Hillary Clinton lost to Donald Trump in part because people who voted for Obama once or twice didn't vote for her. Figuring out why matters if Democrats want to win.
by Atrios at 17:00

Monday, June 19, 2017

The accusation of cultural appropriation is a secular version of the charge of blasphemy. It is the insistence that certain beliefs and images are so important to particular cultures that they may not appropriated by others. This is most clearly seen in the debate about Ms Schutz’s painting, Open Casket.

In 1955, Emmett Till’s mother urged the publication of photographs of her son’s mutilated body as it lay in its coffin. Mr Till’s murder, and the photographs, played a major role in shaping the civil rights movement and have acquired an almost sacred quality. It was from those photos that Ms Schutz began her painting.

To suggest that she, as a white painter, should not depict images of black suffering is as troubling as the demand by some Muslims that Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses should be censored because of supposed blasphemies in its depiction of Islam. In fact, it is more troubling because, as the critic Adam Shatz has observed, the campaign against Ms Schutz’s work contains an ‘implicit disavowal that acts of radical sympathy, and imaginative identification, are possible across racial lines’.

I have a longer post on this [now up], but in the meantime a comment which may or may not appear.
[He accepted it] The two links below are to a post by Malik from last year, with my comments, and to my earlier post on Shriver.

Your arguments as usual depend on the idea of appropriation, not specific acts itself. A Jewish joke told by a Jew is not the same as the same joke being told by a gentile. The meaning is the context. Your universalism renders context irrelevant; like most philosophy yours is rendered less apolitical than anti-political.

You defend Dana Schutz' painting as intent, as if reception were or should be irrelevant. The painting is shallow, as politics and as art. Without knowing the reference you'd never know what it was about. The face becomes an excuse for a sort of bad abstraction. It's not an argument for censorship to say it should never have been in the show. It's in. It's up. And the pretense that art objects, commodities in a luxury market should have some sort of leftist cred is as absurd as it is ubiquitous. But the painting itself is crap, as intent and as art.

Context: It was Mamie Till's decision to have an open casket. If a political operative had made the choice in her absence and without her permission would she have had the right to be angry at the "appropriation" of her son's body and her own tragedy for vulgar political ends? The obvious answer is yes, and you'd admit it. But this is the sort of thing you don't bother to think about.

The best response to the shallow liberalism of Schutz and the defenders of her work as interesting or serious or valuable is the exhibition of Alice Neel curated by Hilton Als, and up at the same time, though few seemed to notice the relation.

Good art can be offensive; good art can be racist, but it can't be shallow. You defend Schutz as you defended Shriver's racist gesture, as an "idea", which therefore was not racist. In fact Shriver is a nativist and the gesture was offending on purpose. It's her right to do so. I defend her right, not her ideas.

...On point after point, America’s nonimmigrants are failing our country. Crime? A study by the Cato Institute notes that nonimmigrants are incarcerated at nearly twice the rate of illegal immigrants, and at more than three times the rate of legal ones.

Educational achievement? Just 17 percent of the finalists in the 2016 Intel Science Talent Search — often called the “Junior Nobel Prize” — were the children of United States-born parents. At the Rochester Institute of Technology, just 9.5 percent of graduate students in electrical engineering were nonimmigrants.

Religious piety — especially of the Christian variety? More illegal immigrants identify as Christian (83 percent) than do Americans (70.6 percent), a fact right-wing immigration restrictionists might ponder as they bemoan declines in church attendance.

Business creation? Nonimmigrants start businesses at half the rate of immigrants, and accounted for fewer than half the companies started in Silicon Valley between 1995 and 2005. Overall, the share of nonimmigrant entrepreneurs fell by more than 10 percentage points between 1995 and 2008, according to a Harvard Business Review study.

Nor does the case against nonimmigrants end there. The rate of out-of-wedlock births for United States-born mothers exceeds the rate for foreign-born moms, 42 percent to 33 percent. The rate of delinquency and criminality among nonimmigrant teens considerably exceeds that of their immigrant peers. A recent report by the Sentencing Project also finds evidence that the fewer immigrants there are in a neighborhood, the likelier it is to be unsafe.

And then there’s the all-important issue of demographics. The race for the future is ultimately a race for people — healthy, working-age, fertile people — and our nonimmigrants fail us here, too. “The increase in the overall number of U.S. births, from 3.74 million in 1970 to 4.0 million in 2014, is due entirely to births to foreign-born mothers,” reports the Pew Research Center. Without these immigrant moms, the United States would be faced with the same demographic death spiral that now confronts Japan.

Bottom line: So-called real Americans are screwing up America. Maybe they should leave, so that we can replace them with new and better ones: newcomers who are more appreciative of what the United States has to offer, more ambitious for themselves and their children, and more willing to sacrifice for the future. In other words, just the kind of people we used to be — when “we” had just come off the boat.

2003

The politics of educated liberalism is the politics of reassurance, of protecting your own interests while wanting to be liked. If you're a leftist, even the bourgeois variety, you need to make the hard choices. This country feeds off the energy of new arrivals, who trample its exhausted native underclass. But I love these new people, who live a double life of greed and community, a double life Americans of any class seem unable to understand. Of the immigrants I know who've been both here and Europe, most would live there if they could. They don't love the American dream, but they need American money. I'm rewriting this on June 17, 2005, softening the tone, but I'll leave the original punch line just for laughs. After American workers gain the imagination and the pride that immigrant tradesman bring with them, I'll move back to this country; because once they close the borders, I'm leaving.

Tuesday, June 13, 2017

The main question remains: how does a programme which is so clearly pro-rich and anti-social succeed in appealing to a majority of Americans as it did in 1980 and again in 2016? The classical answer is that globalisation and cut-throat competition between countries leads to the reign of each man for himself. But that is not sufficient: we have to add the skill of the Republicans in using nationalist rhetoric, in cultivating a degree of anti-intellectualism and, above all, in dividing the working classes by exacerbating ethnic, cultural and religious divisions.

As early as the 1960s, the Republicans began to benefit from the gradual transfer of part of the vote of the white and southern working classes, unhappy with the civil rights movement and the social policies, accused of benefitting primarily the Black population. This long and in-depth movement continued with the crucial victory of Nixon in 1972 (faced with the Democrat, McGovern, who suggested implementing a universal basic income at federal level, financed by a new increase in estate duties: this was the summit of the Roosevelt Programme), Reagan in 1980, and finally Trump in 2016 (who had no hesitation in racially stigmatising Obamacare, as Nixon and Reagan had done previously).

In the meantime, the Democrat electorate focussed increasingly on the most highly educated and the minorities, and in the end, in some ways resembled the Republican electorate at the end of the 19th century (upscale Whites and Blacks emancipated), as if the wheel had turned full circle and the Roosevelt coalition uniting the working classes over and above racial differences had ultimately only been a parenthesis.

Let’s hope that Europe, which in some ways is threatened by a similar development with the working classes having greater faith for their defence in the anti-immigrant forces, than in those who describe themselves as progressive – will be capable of learning the lessons of history. And that the inevitable social failure of Trumpism will not lead our “Donald” into a headlong nationalist and military rush, as it has done others before him.

Unfortunately, the leftist-liberal public space is also more and more dominated by the rules of tweet culture: short snaps, retorts, sarcastic or outraged remarks, with no space for multiple steps of a line of argumentation. One passage (a sentence, even part of it) is cut out and reacted to. The stance that sustains these tweet rejoinders is a mixture of self-righteousness, political correctness and brutal sarcasm: the moment anything that sounds problematic is perceived, a reply is automatically triggered, usually a PC commonplace.

Although critics like to emphasise how they reject normativity (“the imposed heterosexual norm”, and so on), their stance is one of ruthless normativity, denouncing every minimal deviation from the PC dogma as “transphobia” or “fascism” or whatsoever. Such a tweet culture which combines official tolerance and openness with extreme intolerance towards actually different views simply renders critical thinking impossible. It is a true mirror image of the blind populist rage à la Donald Trump, and it is simultaneously one of the reasons why the left is so often inefficient in confronting rightist populism, especially in today's Europe. If one just mentions that this populism draws a good part of its energy from the popular discontent of the exploited, one is immediately accused of “class essentialism”.

It is against this background that one should compare the Conservative and the Labour electoral campaigns. The Conservative campaign has reached a new low for the political battled in the UK: scaremongering attacks about Corbyn as a terrorist sympathiser, of the Labour party as a hive of anti-Semitism, and all of this culminating in Theresa May joyously promising to rip off human rights – a politics of fear if there ever was one. No wonder Ukip disappeared from the scene: there is no need for it, since May and Johnson have taken over its job.

Corbyn refused to get caught in these dirty games: with an outspoken naivety, he simply addressed the main issues and concerns of ordinary people, from economic woes to terrorist threat, proposing clear countermeasures. There was no rage and resentment in his statements, no cheap populist rabble-rousing, but also no politically correct self-righteousness. Just addressing ordinary people’s actual concerns with a common decency.

The fact that such an approach amounts to no less than a major shift in our political space is a sad sign of the times we live in. But it is also a new confirmation of old Hegel’s claim that, sometimes, naïve outspokenness is the most devastating and cunning of all strategies.

Friday, June 09, 2017

Earnest idealists, narcissistic idealists, pedants, teenagers, reactionaries, ruled by reflexes that come to the right conclusion X% of the time. Americans who take themselves seriously are the most incurious, loyal to their ides fixes.

Tell me again, leftists, about your abounding concern for women. Please tell me about the need to empower young girls and provide them with opportunities. Please tell me all about your 'pro-woman' stances and policies. Then, if you could, kindly explain how this story fits into all of that.
A mustachioed boy who "identifies as a girl" heroically won gold in the 100 meter dash and 200 meter dash for the Connecticut high school girl’s state championships last week.

Two very serious American left or left-liberal journalists commented yesterday on US politics and foreign policy. One said that politics was getting more international because Americans are now paying more attention to elections in France and the UK, while in Europe lefty "backbenchers" are now in the front. The other praised Corbyn for paying attention to foreign policy while Sanders does not. I reminded them that people in other countries have no choice about whether or not to follow American politics and for Americans foreign policy is still mostly a profession, a luxury, or a hobby for pedants. As for the rest, in Europe even the nativists are internationalist.

American journalists are still know-nothings who think of themselves as intellectuals. The best are immigrants or exiles from the UK. American literary culture is still provincial, because always in the shadow of utility. To have the equivalent to the British crossover from press to politics in the US Joan Didion would be a Republican senator from California, and Norman Mailer would be our bumbling left wing Boris Johnson.

Monday, June 05, 2017

...here. The last version benefitted from talks and workshops at Iowa, Tel-Aviv, Haifa, and Chicago. The abstract:

I argue that the core of genuinely academic freedom ought to be freedom in research and teaching, subject to disciplinary standards of expertise. I discuss the law in the United States, Germany, and England, and express doubts about the American view that distinctively academic freedom ought to encompass "extramural" speech on matters of public importance (speakers should be protected from employment repercussions for such speech, but not because of their freedom qua academics).

I treat freedom of academic expression as a subset of general freedom of expression, focusing on the Millian argument that freedom of expression maximizes discovery of the truth, one regularly invoked by defenders of academic freedom. Marcuse argued against Mill (in 1965) that "indiscriminate" toleration of expression would not maximize discovery of the truth. I show that Marcuse agreed with Mill that free expression is only truth- and utility-maximizing if certain background conditions obtain: thus Mill argues that the British colony in India would be better off with "benevolent despotism" than Millian liberty of expression, given that its inhabitants purportedly lacked the maturity and education requisite for expression to be utility-maximizing. Marcuse agrees with Mill that the background conditions are essential, but has an empirical disagreement with him about what those are and when they obtain: Mill finds them wanting in colonial India, Marcuse finds them wanting in capitalist America.

Perhaps surprisingly, Marcuse believes that "indiscriminate" toleration of expression should be the norm governing academic discussions, despite his doubts about the utility-maximizing value of free expression in capitalist America. Why think that? Here is a reason: where disciplinary standards of expertise govern debate, the discovery of truth really is more likely, but only under conditions of "indiscriminate" freedom of argument, i.e., academic freedom. This freedom is not truly "indiscriminate": its boundaries are set by disciplinary competence, which raises an additional question I try to address.

The last sentence, not quoted on the blog

In sum, the libertarians (Mill and Popper) and the Marxists (Marcuse) can agree that academic freedom is justified, at least when universities are genuine sites of scientific expertise and open debate.

Freedom for me but not for thee; the anti-humanist, fallacious, scholastic unity of the humanities and science.

Sunday, June 04, 2017

I fixed a few things.

Have the patience to make it through the first 2 and a half minutes. If the next section bores you, jump to 5:30. If that bores you, give up. Click full screen to read the subtitles, and if you watch the whole thing be warned that later the subtitles conflict with the audio.

I don't know why I'd assume people get the jokes, but the piece is meaningless without them.